Artlessness
Duncan Fallo well
The Grades Hunter Davies (Weidenfeld & Nicolson pp. 268, £8.95) In the beginning was Mama, the brooding and rather bewildered figure of Olga, who died earlier this year in her suite in the Grosvenor House Hotel. She was 'approximately 94' according to the Times. She was proud of her children but curiously unworldly, unimpressed by minks and diamonds, deeply pained by the fact that none of her sons married a Jewish girl.
Lew is Lord Grade, Chairman and majority shareholder of ACC, the company which owns the ATV Network, Elstree Studios, Pye Records, RCA Records, Northern Songs (Lennon and McCartney), the London Palladium, the Theatre Royal (Drury Lane), the Victoria Palace, Her Majesty's, the Lyric, the Classic chain of cinemas, Berman's and Nathan's costumiers, the Ansafone company, ITC Entertainment Ltd, and so on.
Bernie is Lord Delfont, the Impresario, a company man these days, playing it safe as Chairman of Trusthouse Forte Leisure Ltd. which controls theatres in London and Blackpool, the Talk of the Town, the Empire Ballroom in Leicester Square, leisure centres and squash courts throughout the country, various bits of EMI, EMI Thorn, then it all gets incestuous and confusing.
Leslie was Leslie Grade, the morose one who died in 1979. As the man in charge of the Grade Organisation in the Sixties he might well have ended up the most powerful of all, had a stroke not undermined him in 1966.
And there's little sister Rita, who did the ultimate for a nice Jewish girl — married a nice Jewish doctor — but who retains the family interest in show business. 'Oh, I've met so many famous film people. Ginger Rogers, she was fantastic, the most glamorous person I've ever met. Lauren Baca11, she was lovely. Sophie Tucker was one of the greatest ladies I've ever met . .
Then there's Lew's wife, Kathy, ex-singer Kathleen Moody, Lady Grade, who always cuts her own hair but whose main concern is charity work. 'I hate the word charity, but what else can you call it?' she says artlessly, giving the book its most brilliant line. She also owns the Ivy Restaurant which she runs with the help of their adopted son, Paul.
And there's Lady Delfont, ex-actress Carol Lynne, more critical of the set-up than Lady Grade and with a tendency to reflect in the Freudian style. 'Their background has made them insecure. The spectre of their father hangs over them. His failures have spurred them on.'
In 1912 their father arrived in the East End of London from Russia, with Olga and two sons, Lew and Bernie. They were then called the Winogradskys and 'didn't have a Matzo pudding to their name' according to one old timer. The route out was Hackney, Dollis Hill, Golder's Green, the World, and the boys took it, along with their schoolmates Joe Loss and Sir Charles Clore. Lew and Bernie became professional Charleston dancers and later on theatrical agents by which time young Leslie had joined them. Because they were among the few to remain working in London during the war, they were in a commanding position after it.
Leslie was the ruthless bore. He balanced the books in the background. Of the three, he is the only one in whose life bitterness seems to have played a significant part.
Lord Delfont is the good-looking one. He has plenty of hair and his nose isn't too big. He was born in 1909, something he likes people to know because they never believe it. He has charmed dinner tables in five continents. There are many photographs of him in this book chatting up Royalty in a white tie. Bernie you can take anywhere. 'I don't think I'll be remembered. I haven't done anything. The best thing I would like people to say about me is that I was a nice feller. That's all.'
Lord Grade would never be as wet as this. He is the short ugly one with the cigar. He is unquestionably the star and not even Hunter Davies's pedestrian good manners can quite kill his glorious vitality. Lord Grade has always believed in his work: 'I don't see nothing negative in television.' And in that medium his proudest achievement is Jesus of Nazareth, directed by Zeffirelli. 'It's got taste.' In the world of mass entertainment, 'taste' is as good as you can get. 'Don't give me that permissive society. I don't believe in it. I'm against it. I don't even like double entendres. Mrs Whitehouse isabsolutely right in all her views.' This determination to remain intellectually and emotionally undeveloped explains why Lord Grade turned out to be such a crummy film producer. 'Taste', in the sense he uses it, means atrophy. It can get you by in television, but not these days in the cinema which calls for a more adventurous spirit. This is not a question of 'going dirty', which anyway is only the old puritan confusion between art and pornography (still encountered in the working class), but it does help to have some of the general audacity of the artist. Instead, Lord Grade has adopted the style of a pre-war movie mogul. 'This is my new film we're shooting in Warsaw, about the Pope, the new Pope, the one from Poland. I've been to see him. He loves what we're doing. See this badge in my lapel — the Order of St Sylvester. The last Pope gave it to me. I'm the only Jew to have it.'
Two Jewish immigrant Charleston dancers end up in the House of Lords — it sounds like the beginning of another joke. It is a fabulous success, rich in comedy which Mr Davies is constrained from exploiting by virtue of having the full co operation of the family. The Russian writer Sergei Tretjakov thought that the novel of the future should be living biography, in which the novelist discards the creatures of fantasy for the personalities of reality. New Journalism is a minor fulfilment of this, but on the whole libel laws and censorship, and fear and vanity in the subjects themselves, prevent the result from coming very near the truth to which, as usual, fiction remains a more fruitful approach.
All businessmen are extremely anxious about their image because it is an area of which they know little. The deal — yes; the image — no. William Burroughs says 'I fail to understand why people like J. Paul Getty have to come on with such a stuffy, uninteresting image. He decides to write his life history. I've never read anything so dull, so absolutely devoid of any spark. There must have been something going on. None of it's in the book. If Getty wants to build an image, why doesn't he hire a firstclass writer to write his story?' A question we might put to the Grades, given that Mr Davies produces lines like 'when the chips are down, brothers are brothers and blood will out.' The answer might be because a first-class writer would be intolerant of pretension and expose it; because the businessman, living in a universe of exploiters and exploited, is terrified of giving anything away. This book isn't as bad as Getty's but it strains hard in that direction.
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